Communism failed because government central planning doesn't work. After watching Senate majority leader Tom Daschle's performance on "Fox News Sunday," I'm glad that he has little say in the direction the U.S. economy takes.

SNOW: Now, a couple of months ago, you gave an economic speech, and you talked about the president's tax plan. Let me read you a quote from that and then a follow-up thing from The Washington Post.

First you said, "Not only did the tax cut fail to prevent a recession, as its supporters said it would, it probably made the recession worse."

Now, The Washington Post had a news article, well, just yesterday. It said, "After-tax or disposable personal income was 1.6 percent in January in part because of the tax-cutting legislation enacted last year."

Do you stand by your earlier remarks?

DASCHLE: Absolutely. Absolutely, Tony. My feeling has always been that we exacerbated, significantly, the long-term interest-rate problem by creating the debt that we're in now.

You both have been very aggressive over the years in saying, you know, that fiscal management, fiscal policy is important. Fiscal policy is important here. The more we compete in the private sector for the available money, for whatever purpose, I think, the higher the interests rates are going to go. And interest rates...

SNOW: But at this point, long-term interest rates are down since the president took office.

DASCHLE: Long-term interest rates have actually gone up slightly last year. I don't know what they are today, but they have actually gone up. All the other interest rates were cut. We didn't see this same corresponding reduction in long-term interest rates that we saw in the short-term rates.

And the only reason for that is because most investors will tell you that they expect the government, once again, as we did in the '80s and early '90s, that once again the government was going to be competing with the private sector for available resources. And that's going to drive up long-term interest rates, and that will have an affect on housing and other long-term investments that we've got to be concerned about.

SNOW: Right now housing is going through the roof, so evidently they haven't gotten the memo yet.

From what I've read economists say that this is/was one of the mildest recessions in U.S. history. If Bush's tax cut made it worse, as Daschle claims, then I'm not sure that anybody really noticed. Daschle's economic theory that the government needs money during a recession than the American people is laughable. Like a petulant child, Daschle keeps making a spectacle of himself, in an effort to prove that he's important on the national political stage.